The Wish: A Novel

Hermann Sudermann

The Wish

A Novel

Published by Good Press, 2022

goodpress@okpublishing.info

EAN 4064066173746

Table of Contents

Authorized Edition .

INTRODUCTION.

THE WISH.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

The End.

Authorized Edition.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION.

Table of Contents

Since the beginning of time men have been accustomed to regard the end of a century as a period of decadence. The waning nineteenth century is no more fortunate than its predecessors. We are continually being invited to speculate on the signs around us of decay in politics, in religion, in art, in the whole social fabric. It is not for us to inquire here concerning the truth or the ethics of that belief. But, as far as literature is concerned, it is very certain that the last years of the present century will be remembered for the extraordinary talent shown by a few young novelists and dramatists in most of the countries of Europe. In England, we can point to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. J. M. Barrie; in France, to M. Paul Margueritte and M. Marcel Prévost; in Belgium, to M. Maurice Maeterlinck; in Germany, to Gerhard Hauptmann, Ludwig Fulda, and Hermann Sudermann.

The events of Sudermann's life are few; and he has the good sense to prefer to be known through his works rather than through the medium of the professional interviewer. The facts here set down, however, we owe to the courtesy of Sudermann himself a circumstance that lends them an additional interest.

Hermann Sudermann was born September 30, 1857, in Matzicken, a poor village in Heydekrug, a district of East Prussia, situated on the Russian frontier. It is not unlikely that the following passage taken from one of his novels bears some resemblance to the place:--

"The estate that my father farmed was situated on a high hill close to the Prussian frontier; an uncultivated, wild park sloping gently towards the open fields formed one side of the hill, while the other sank steeply down to a little river. On the farther side of the stream you could see a dirty little Polish frontier village.

"Standing at the edge of the precipice you looked down on the ruinous shingle roofs; the smoke came up through the rifts in them. You looked right into the midst of the miserable life of the dirty streets where half naked children wallowed in the filthy where the women squatted idly on the threshold, and where the men in torn smocks, with spade on shoulder, betook themselves to the alehouses.

There was nothing attractive about the town, and the rabble of frontier Cossacks, who galloped here and there on their catlike, drowsy nags, did not increase the charm.

Sudermann began his education at the school of Elbing. But his parents were in poor circumstances, and at the age of fourteen he found it necessary to think about earning a living, and was apprenticed to a chemist. He continued his studies in his leisure time with such good results that he returned to school, this time at Tilsit. In 1875 he went to the university of Königsberg, and in 1877 to that of Berlin. His first intention was to become a teacher, and while still pursuing his studies undertook for a few months the duties of tutor in the house of the poet Hans Hopfen. But in 1881, after six years spent in studying history, philosophy, literature, and modern languages (Sudermann understands English perfectly), he turned to journalism, and edited the Deutsches Reichsblatt, a political weekly. He soon threw aside newspaper work for true literature, for what the Germans call belletristik, and he has become famous through his novels, short stories, and plays. He is good-looking, with a dark melancholy face that lights up with a most remarkable and expressive smile when he speaks; nothing could be more unaffected than his manner, nor more charming than his whole personality. As yet there is no Sudermann Society for the discussion of the author's works, but in Berlin, where he has many admiring friends, Sudermann occasionally reads to them his productions while they are yet unpublished. The little story called Iolanthe's Hochzeit was first heard in that way.

Although Sudermann's work is in all its aspects essentially modern, indeed all the conditions and problems of modern life have the highest interest for him, he belongs to no class, ranges himself with neither realists nor idealists, and bows to the yoke of no literary fashion. In common with all great artists, Sudermann paints his own age, but while portraying men and women as he knows them, in the nineteenth century, he gives them, at least in his novels and tales, the human nature that is the same through all time. He has lived in Berlin, and his dramas give us life in that city both among the proletariat and the rich middle class. He has lived in East Prussia, and there is laid the scene of his longer novels. He is familiar with other parts of Germany, with Italy, and with Paris, and everywhere he has used his gift of keen observation to good purpose. A certain melancholy, a feeling of the inevitableness of things, if we may be allowed the expression, runs through all his writings, and may perhaps be traced to the effect on his sensitive and high-strung nature of the East Prussian landscape, amid which he spent his boyhood. The meadow-flats and corn-lands, the meagre pine-woods, and dark, lonely pools of his native district, form the background of most of his tales. Numerous passages might be quoted which would serve to show the melancholy and loneliness of the landscape. As an example we may take:--

"Thick and heavy as if you could grasp them with your hands, the clouds spread over the flat land. Here and there the trunk of a willow stretched forth its rugged knots to the air, heavily laden with moisture. The tree was soaked with damp, and glistened with the drops that had hung in rows on the bare boughs. The wheels sank deep into the boggy road that ran between withered reeds and sedge.

* * * * *

"The moon stood high in the heavens and shed her calm, bluish light far over the sleeping heath. The clumps of alders on the moor bore wreaths of lights and from the slender silvery trunks of the birches which bordered the broad straight road in endless rows, came a sparkle and brightness that made the road seem as if lost far below in the silvery distance.

Silence all around. The birds had long ceased singing. A stillness of the late summer time, the complacent stillness of departing life lay over the broad plain. You scarcely heard the sound of a cricket in the ditches, or a field-mouse disturbed in its slumbers, gliding through the tall grass with its low chipping whistle.

Such pictures constantly meet us in the pages of Sudermann's books; taken in connection with their setting, they are often of great force and beauty. Nothing, however, is obtruded; there is no searching after a dramatic background, or undue word-painting; everything is in keeping with and subordinate to the main interest of the tale.

With such surroundings, Sudermann cleverly assimilates his characters. They are mostly the victims of circumstances which they are more or less unable to overcome. In some cases the fault, as with Leo Sellenthin in Es war, Sudermann's latest novel, lies in the weakness or sinfulness of the man; in others, in surroundings and events for which the man is not himself directly responsible. Sometimes the noble unselfish love and devotion of a woman make a happier state of things possible; Sudermann is a firm believer in the power and influence of good women in human life. His women are not so sharply outlined as Ibsen's, but he recognises in the sex, though much more vaguely, like possibilities. For example, Leonore in Die Ehre sees the folly and emptiness of fashionable life and has the courage to give her hand where she loves, to a man who, by her set, would be considered far beneath her. Magda, in Heimat, refuses to desert her child. And his young girls are even more charming, more natural than those of Ibsen. Eager-hearted Dina Dorf, with her desire for a larger life in the world; hard-working Petra Stockman with her delight in her work and her unflinching truth and honesty; Bolette Wangel with her desire for knowledge, to know something about everything are, as everybody knows, among Ibsen's most delightful creations. In Es War Sudermann gives us as perfect and natural a study of a young girl as we have met with in fiction or the drama for a very long while. Hertha cherishes a secret love for a man much older than herself but has reason to fear that his affections are set on a married woman, the wife of his best friend. To Hertha's innocent and unworldly mind this is a great puzzle; to her the sacredness of love between husband and wife seems a matter of course.

Certainly the beautiful woman was a thousand times lovelier than poor Hertha--and she was, moreover, much cleverer.... But could she--and therein lay the great puzzle, the invincible contradiction that knocked all suspicion on the head--could she as a married woman possibly be an object of love to a man other than her husband? Wives were loved by their husbands--that is why they are married and by no one else in the world.

But Hertha determines to take such means as are within her power of discovering if suck things are possible, if such things exist. She first consults her books--books, of course, suited to a young girl's library. She goes through her novels, but nothing in them points to the enormity. Then she turns to the classics, to Schiller!

Amalie was a young girl--so was Luise--but then there was the queen of Spain! However, in that case it was clear as noonday how little poets deserved to be trusted, for that a man should fall in love with his stepmother could only take place in the world of imagination where genius, drawn away from the earth, intoxicated with inspiration, soars aloft. Not in vain had she, a year and a half before, written a school composition on 'Genius and Reality,' in which she had treated the question in a most exhaustive manner.

She next tries her friend Elly, a girl of her own age, but much more experienced in the ways of the world.

"'Listen, dear, I want to ask you a very important question. You're in love, aren't you?'

"'Yes'; replied Elly.

"'And you're sure the man's in love with you?'

'Why do you say man"?' asked Elly. 'Curt is my ideal. A little time ago it was Bruno--and before that it was Alfred--but now it's Curt, Yet he's not a man.'

"'What is he, then?'

"'He's a young man.'

'Oh! that's it, is it? No, he's certainly not a man.' And Hertha's eyes shone: she knew what a 'man' looked like. 'Well, darling,' she went on, 'do you think that a man," or a young man--it's all the same--could possibly love a married woman?'

"'Of course--naturally he would,' replied Elly, with perfect calmness.

"Hertha smiled indulgently at such want of intelligence.

"'No, no, little one,' she said. 'I don't mean his own wife, but a woman who is the wife of another?'

"'So do I! replied Elly.

"'And that seems to you quite a matter of course?'

"'My dear child, I didn't think you were so innocent! said Elly; 'everybody knows as much as that. And formerly it was even worse. A true knight always loved another man's wife: it was a great crime to love his own wife. He would cut off his right hand for the stranger's sake, and would die for her, pressing her blue favour to his lips; for you see at that time they always wore her blue favour. You'll find it in every history of literature.'

"Hertha became very thoughtful. 'Ah! in those days!' she said, with the ghost of a smile; 'in those days men went to tournaments and stabbed each other in sport with their lances.'

"'And to-day,' whispered Elly, 'men shoot each other dead with pistols.'

"Hertha felt as if she had been stabbed to the heart, and the little pink and white daughter of Eve continued, 'I think it must be quite delightful when one is married to know that some one is hopelessly in love with you. It's quite certain that most unhappy love affairs arise in that way.'

"The next day Hertha questioned her grandmother.

"'Grandmother, I'm grown up now, aren't I?'

"'Yes--so, so,' answered the old lady.

"'And probably I shall soon be married.'

"'You!' shouted her grandmother, in deadly terror. Doubtless the wretched child had come to confide in her the addresses of some booby of a neighbour.

"'Yes.' continued Hertha, inarticulately and with great hesitation; 'with my big fortune I am not likely to be an old maid.'

"'Child!' exclaimed the old lady, 'of whom are you thinking?'

"Hertha blushed to her neck. 'I?' she stammered, trying to preserve an indifferent tone of voice, 'of nobody.'

"'Oh, then you were merely talking generally?'

"'Of course; I only meant generally'

"'Well, and what do you want to know?'

"'I want to know--how it is with--you understand--with love when one----'

"'When one----'

"'Well, when one is married?'

"'Then you go on loving just as you did before.' replied her grandmother, lightly.

"'Yes, I know that. But suppose you love another man to whom you aren't married?'

"'Wha--t!' In her terror the old lady let her spectacles fall off her nose. 'What other?'

"Hertha suddenly felt as if she must collapse. She had to summon all her courage and pull herself together in order to go on.

"'Can't it happen, grandmother dear, that some one to whom you're not married takes it into his head----'

'My dear child' replied the grandmother, 'never come to me with such foolish questions. You cannot understand such things. Now give me a kiss and get your knitting.'

So that plan did not answer. There was still one further possibility of discovery. Hertha had a school friend who had lately got married. She would ask her. So she began:--

"'Wives love their husbands, that goes without saying. But do you think it possible that wives can be loved by other men?'

"'How odd you are', replied Meta. 'You can't prevent people loving.'

"'I know that. But a man, don't you see, who would----'

"'Well, that sort of thing does happen.'

"'What! is some one in love with you?'

"Meta blushed, 'I don't bother about it. It's quite enough that Hans loves me, and of course I should very politely forbid anything of the sort.'

"'Then people do forbid such things?'

"'Certainly, if they're told of it.'

"'What! you might be told?'

"'Sometimes, if the man who is in love with you is very bold.'

"'Good gracious,' said Hertha, shocked, 'If anyone behaved like that to me, I should box his ears.' But in great anxiety she continued, 'Do you think it likely that there are women who have a different opinion?'

"'Oh, yes!' said Meta.

"'Who--in the end--return the bold mans love?'

'Even so.'

Then Meta repeats certain gossip that confirms Hertha's worst fears. The whole chapter should be read in order to appreciate rightly the charm and pathos and naturalness of the delightful piece of character drawing.

Like Ibsen and Zola, Sudermann does not hesitate to set the truth before us even when it is terrible or brutal or revolting. But he differs from them in having a less gloomy outlook, in firmly believing that, at the same time as human nature is coarse and brutal, stupid and violent, it is loving, capable of sacrifice and of deep feeling. He sees the strange not to say the inexplicable mixture of good and evil in all things human, and knows man to be neither all gold nor all alloy. This we take it is the true realism.

To make Sudermann's point of view clear to English readers there is perhaps no better nor more direct way than to give a brief account of his works. They are three novels, Frau Sorge (Dame Care), published in 1886, Der Katzensteg (the name of a small wooden bridge over a waterfall that plays a prominent part in the story), 1888, Es war (It Was), 1893; three volumes of short tales, Geschwister (Brothers and Sisters), first published in the Berliner Tageblatt in 1884 and 1886 respectively (one of the stories, Der Wunsch, appears in the present volume), Im Zwielicht (In the Twilight), novelettes written in various newspapers, and Iolanthe's Hochzeit (Iolanthe's Wedding), 1892; and three dramas, Die Ehre (Honour), Sodom's Ende (The Destruction of Sodom), and Heimat (The Paternal Hearth).

The most perfectly artistic of his longer novels, and that most deeply impregnated with the peculiar characteristics of East Prussian landscape is Frau Sorge. Paul, the hero, is born just at the moment when his father's difficulties make it necessary